Appetite for Life : The Education of a Young Diarist, 1924-1927 (9781551996776) Read online

  The play went quite well. There was a lot of clapping and some laughter. I was not so nervous once the curtain went up. The only trouble was with my moustache which kept slipping off.

  21 April 1925.

  Charlottetown, where we arrived today, is an exceptionally dusty place and we got a very dusty welcome from a local clergyman, an Englishman with a ponderous jowl and a canonical manner. He took us to the Rectory, but only for tea, although it was quite a big house and he could have put us up, or at least offered us a meal. He has a selfish-looking wife, who kept on a sort of pink boudoir cap during tea, and three daughters, one slightly cross-eyed. He had made no arrangements as to where we were to stay, and Ross and I had to search around for ourselves till we found this boarding-house which stinks of stale whisky. Females kept appearing and disappearing in the hall. After supper I went out onto the hotel verandah and got into conversation with a stoutish gentleman who was smoking a cigar and rocking to and fro in one of the hotel rocking-chairs. I sat down beside him. He turned out to be a salesman for Eversharp pencils. I remarked that this seemed to be a pretty lousy kind of boarding-house and he said, “Oh, there are compensations.” I asked him what he meant and he laughed and said, “Well, it isn’t for me to tell you if you don’t know, but it is more of a bawdy-house than a boarding-house.” I was going back to break the news to Ross, with whom I was sharing a room, when in the hall a woman stopped me and said, “Hey kid, want to come and listen to my gramophone records later on? It’ll only cost you two bucks. It’s the third room down the hall.” I could not see her well in the half light except that she was a woman, not a girl, quite plump, with dark eyes. After Ross and I had gone to bed, I got restless and said, “You know, I think I’ll try and see what it’s like.” He said, “I shouldn’t if I were you,” but I put on my trousers and went down the hall to her room, knocked, and went in. She was lying on her bed reading a comic paper but she looked up and said, “I thought you might be coming around.” Then she put on the gramophone and without further ado began to undress. She did not turn out the overhead light and then I saw that she was really old, I mean at least thirty, and when she smiled her mouth was full of gold teeth. My heart and everything else sank. She said, “Cheer up, it’ll soon be Christmas. Why don’t you take your pants off and make yourself at home,” but I knew I couldn’t go through with it, so I said, “I don’t feel very well. It’s something I ate for supper.” I wanted to get out of the room but I didn’t want to offend her by not considering her attractive, so I said, “Tomorrow night,” and put four dollars on the table by her bed instead of the two dollars she had mentioned in the hall, and backed away towards the door hoping I had not hurt her feelings, but all she did was to pick up the money and say, “Okay, see you later.” When I got back to my room Ross said, “How did it go?” I said, “Oh, it was a terrific experience.” I don’t know if he believed me. Anyway, I tried.

  22 April 1925. Saint John, New Brunswick.

  Here I am staying with a Miss Jack in a house full of a familiar kind of china and furniture and her talk is full of familiar names and phrases. She is a lovable old body and no mean conversationalist. She went on non-stop from supper to midnight. She has piled-up white hair, wears a black velvet band round her neck and a little watch pinned to her bosom.

  23 April 1925.

  This dark old house of the Jacks’ smells of the yellowing newspapers stacked on every chair, but some of the furniture is beautiful and belonged originally to the Duke of Kent, Queen Victoria’s father, when he was out here as Commander-in-Chief. Miss Jack provided an enormous breakfast. I ate three helpings of kedgeree. We had to conduct our conversations in whispers as Mr. Jack was still asleep. He has an all-night job as night-watchman at the city market, having fallen on lean times. However, when he did emerge he was a very distinguished-looking figure, more like an ambassador than a night-watchman. He is a jocular old gent and very much given to making puns. It must be exhausting in the long run for Miss Jack, except that as she never stops talking herself perhaps she doesn’t notice. In the afternoon a youth with an enormous boil on his neck came round to take me for a walk, a task allotted to him by the Jacks. Saint John on a muggy grey Sunday afternoon is dismal. As it is built on hills one always seems to be plodding up and plodding down again. The youth, whose name was Ewing, could think of nothing better to do with me but to take me to the Saint John Park, where we gazed gloomily at some very mangy bears. When I offered him a cigarette he refused as he has some kind of crank theory that smoking is bad for the health. We went back to the Jacks’ for tea. Miss Jack’s married sister was there. She is more worldly than Miss Jack and knows my family. She remarked in passing in a sort of bantering fashion that they had “a somewhat exaggerated idea of their own importance.”

  In the evening to church in a dignified and commodious city church with comfortable pews.

  24 April 1925.

  In the morning went down to the theatre, or the Opera House as they call it. It is very large and excessively gloomy. The first thing that occurred to all of us was how on earth all these seats would ever be filled for our show. To cheer ourselves, Ross and I went to the Admiral Beatty Hotel for lunch. It is a magnificent palace of a place. Ross wisely ordered the table d’hôte, which only cost ninety cents, and I foolishly ordered à la carte, which cost $2.55. This quite embittered me. Miss Jack spent the afternoon going all over town urging people to come to the play, but despite her efforts the audience was tiny and the size of the Opera House made it seem tinier still. It was most discouraging. When I got home Miss Jack was sitting up for me for a good chat which lasted on her side till my eyes were closing and I nearly fell off my chair.

  25 April 1925.

  In the morning I nearly missed the train. Breakfast was so leisurely as Miss Jack cannot be hurried and I was most anxious to be polite as she has been so kind. On my breakfast plate was a courtly note from Mr. Jack, who was still in bed. Miss Jack says he is quite known for the delightful notes he writes.

  We arrived at St. George’s in a thunderstorm. The place is a village with one straggling street. The people all turned round to stare at “the actors.” We felt quite like movie stars. The whole company was seized with a fit of high spirits. It was a reaction from the fiasco at Saint John. When we were putting up the scenery we all began singing and shouting and dressing up in each other’s wigs and costumes. We made such a noise that Mrs. Macrae, the chaperone, said we could be heard in the street and that people would be complaining. She is such a wet blanket. Far from complaining, the townspeople packed the hall and laughed their heads off at the play.

  26 April 1925.

  We are staying with the local clergyman and his wife, and I am sharing a room with Max. The clergyman is a large, ponderous, slow-moving, pipe-smoking man who occasionally lowers a remark into the world. His wife is a pale, thin-lipped woman with a somewhat repressive manner who gave me the feeling from the first that she was not too keen to have us to stay. Max was behaving all day in a somewhat peculiar manner unlike his usual carefree self, hardly replying when spoken to. Last night when we came back after the show the truth came out. He has had a letter from his “woman” (as he always calls her although she is only eighteen) breaking off their engagement. He produced a bottle of whisky and proceeded to down one tumblerful after another, at one moment cursing her as a silly little bitch and the next moment saying that she was too good for him and that he would never amount to anything. Then he began about his boyhood, how his father used to beat him with a heavy belt with a buckle on it, how his deafness had meant that he could not keep up with the class, etc. I said, “Anyway, you are the best hockey player in college.” But that did not comfort him. He said, “If I had paid more attention to studies instead of sports I might get somewhere.” I said, “Perhaps you are well out of the engagement, as you say she is a bitch.” He said, “I never said that. She is a swell girl, really swell, but she wants to be a goddam nurse, so she won’t marry me.” All this
time he was pacing up and down the room, taking his clothes off as he did so and throwing them on the floor until he had nothing on. There was a rubber plant on the window-sill which Mrs. H., our hostess, had pointed out as if it was a special privilege to have it in our room. Max suddenly grabbed hold of it and shouting, “Hell’s bells! What do I care?”, he hurled it out of the window. I said, “That’s just fine. It’s going to be lovely tomorrow explaining that to Mrs. H.” “All right,” he said, “I will go and pick it up off the lawn,” and he rushed into the hall stark naked. I went after him and said, “For Christ’s sake, Max, what do you think you’re doing?” but he gave me a kind of buffet on the chest, so I said, “Okay, you’re right, you’re just as much of a damn fool as you say you are.” Then he calmed down, went back into the room, and sat on the chair beside his bed and began to sob. It was pretty awful but I remembered how I had felt sometimes about Katherine, so I just swallowed down the last of the whisky and went out like a light.

  27 April 1925.

  When I woke up this morning the whole room was stinking of whisky, even the curtains smelt of it. I got dressed somehow, feeling pretty terrible, and went down to breakfast. There was no waking Max. He was lying like a log. Canon and Mrs. H. were sitting at the breakfast table. I plunged in right away and said, “Max and I are so terribly sorry about the accident to your beautiful plant which got knocked off the window-sill as we were undressing.” Mrs. H. said, “So I observed from the remains on the lawn. One wonders how students at an Anglican college are brought up these days. It isn’t only my ‘beautiful plant,’ as you rightly call it, but the noise and the swearing. This is a Christian house, you know.” Canon H. had been just sitting there puffing away at his pipe and not saying a word. Then he got up and said to Mrs. H., “You won’t forget about my clean surplice for Sunday,” and went out. He said nothing to me, but as he left the room he gave me a queer kind of look, not exactly a wink but nearly. Mrs. H.’s hands were trembling with suppressed rage as she took up her teacup. Then I had an inspiration. I said, “You know, Mrs. H., what I said just now was not the whole truth. What happened was that Max has had a disappointment in love and he was so upset that he did not know what he was doing.” It worked like a charm. She looked quite softened as if she knew all about disappointments in love herself. So she said, “Poor fellow!”, and that was all, which was very sporting of her, and I think I should join the diplomatic service.

  28 April 1925.

  A most unlucky day. We departed by train for Woodstock through a dull country of firs and rocks and were met by the theatre manager, a most disagreeable man with a wet cigar in his mouth. He and Hunter, our own “business manager,” got into an altercation at once. The theatre manager said that practically no tickets had been sold. From what he had heard about the show, he was not at all surprised. Hunter said that, if the tickets had not been sold, it was because the manager had done nothing to advertise the play. The manager said would Hunter kindly not tell him how to run his own business. Hunter said someone should have told him that long ago. Finally Hunter said, “Well, in view of your inefficiency, if it is nothing worse, we cancel our contract for the theatre.” The manager said, “Not so fast, young man. Who the hell do you think you are? Just because you kids are at college you think you can get away with murder. Well, you are not going to get away with this. You owe me seventy dollars for the theatre you hired and you are going to pay it,” and he walked off. This left us with the rest of the day in Woodstock as the next train doesn’t leave till tomorrow morning. It was very hot and dusty and the whole company sat on the steps of the post office for hours, talking over our dilemma and then singing a few songs to pass the time. We had a lunch consisting of cold burnt potatoes and bad baked beans in a dirty feeding-place and then went to our boarding-house. Ross, Max, and I have to share one bedroom with one single bed and a cot in it. Over the bed is a photograph of a woman in black bombasine with a face like a pudding, a mean little mouth, and marbly eyes. She looks so like the proprietress of this dump that she must be her mother or grandmother. We tried to get the girls of the company to come out with us, but they were sulky and sat in a heap in the sitting-room pretending to read old magazines. Then, as we were going to bed, a police constable appeared and asked for Hunter. Mrs. Macrae, of course, lost her head and said that we would all end up in jail. The constable told Hunter that if we did not pay the seventy dollars we owed the theatre manager we would not be allowed to leave town. I don’t know what authority he had to say this but Hunter, from being so arrogant in the morning, suddenly seemed quite deflated and paid over the seventy dollars.

  29 April 1925.

  I woke to find the whole company in a bustle of departure. We had to hurry to get the scenery on the train as, in addition to what we had paid him, the theatre manager had threatened to “impound” our scenery. We don’t know if he could really do this. He seems to be able to do anything he likes in Woodstock, New Brunswick. At last we got on the train and went through some deadly dull country till we got to Fredericton. Here the streets are full of the University of New Brunswick students, who walk along in twos and threes, almost shoving you off the sidewalk. They look as if they have a pretty good opinion of themselves and have certainly not been welcoming to us, although we do come from another Maritime university. Not that we seek their company. Far from it, but it does get dull tramping the streets and not knowing anyone.

  30 April 1925.

  There were some letters waiting for me here, one from Anan telling me that old Mrs. Kessler was dead. She and her son, the American playwright, lived in an old crimson-brick house smelling of their innumerable cats by the lake near Port Hope, and they used to ask Peter and me to visit them from school on Sundays when we were immured at Trinity College School. They talked about plays and actors and the witty world of New York, and it was like breathing a different air from school. Mr. Kessler, the son, was a pink-faced little man with white curly hair. He wrote Sweet Nell of Old Drury and other musical comedies. He made almost too much of a fuss of us, particularly of Peter. But Mrs. Kessler was the real character. Small, erect figure, pale blue eyes in a withered old face, she was interested in everything and made one feel like a human being instead of a schoolboy.

  This morning after breakfast we went to the cathedral. The Dean, a pot-bellied man with a potato in his mouth, gabbled through the service and preached a nonsensical sermon. In the evening the company were all invited to his house, where we sat about for hours ranged on sofas, nibbling some special cookies made by the Dean’s wife and drinking lukewarm ginger ale, and making forced conversation with some suitably churchy boys and girls who had been hand-picked to meet us. I noticed that the Dean’s daughter, who was there when we arrived and was quite attractive-looking, made herself scarce early in the proceedings despite signals from her mother to remain, and I glimpsed her through the window bounding into the rumble-seat of a waiting car in company with one of the University of New Brunswick sheiks.

  1 May 1925. Hampton, New Brunswick.

  This is Malcolm Dymock’s home town. He is the hero of Hampton and was so riotously applauded before, during, and after the play that I could see Alice, who is acting opposite him, was looking furious as no one could hear her lines, and then he was given two bouquets and she none. One of the bouquets was brought up on stage by a wee monster of a little girl from the junior class in the school Malcolm was at here. She was bedizened with ribbons.

  After the show was over Alice and I went for a walk under the stars right out of the town into some fields, and we talked and I found that, like me, she is restless and longs for fame and excitement. We wondered what it would be like to be old. Suppose I was really as old as the old man I am acting in this play, with white hair and a white moustache, hobbling about on a cane. I said to Alice that I was certain I would die young and she said she had the same premonition about herself.

  I shared a room at the hotel with Max. He played his ukulele half the night. I didn’t mi
nd as I couldn’t sleep anyway, but someone in the room above kept knocking on the floor. Only in the morning did we find out that the person who had been kept awake was none other than Malcolm Dymock, which was a piece of luck.

  2 May 1925. Annapolis Royal.

  This place is the cradle of the race. In other words, my father’s family originally came from here. The older generation, like Cousins Ella and Eliza, go on so often, too often, about the glories of The Grange, my great-grandfather’s house, and the terraced gardens, orchards, broad acres, etc. I have seen a portrait of my greatgrandfather. He looks a regular old curmudgeon, with little high-up eyes, like pictures of Henry the Eighth. When he was a member of the Nova Scotian Legislature, some time about 1820, he put forward a proposal to introduce negro slavery into Nova Scotia. Fortunately, hardly anyone supported the proposal. Many members of the family are buried in the old churchyard and there is a monument there to my grandfather’s second wife and on it is the inscription “She did what she could.” I have been in Annapolis Royal before and it always makes me feel uncomfortable. So many older people remember my family and come up to me and say, “I hope you will follow in your father’s footsteps.”

  3 May 1925.

  We crossed to Prince Edward Island. The whole train was put on the boat. Prince Edward Island seems a rich agricultural country of red earth and ploughed fields. At Souris we were met by an authoritative old lady with a wandering eye who said that, as it was Sunday we must go to church, and as the only Protestant church there was a Presbyterian one, we should go to it. I have not been to a Presbyterian church since I was a child and used to go when we stayed at Stewiacke with old Roxie. This church did not seem like a church at all. I mean to say, their service is so unmystical and undevotional.